Proposal for Changes to the 3 Kingdoms DLC

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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This is something I made a month ago when the DLC was first announced and I’ve decided to repost this here from Reddit considering the constant brigading that’s happening there and since the Devs asks for feedback. Some updates have been made from the Original post.

Remove all Hero units from being Trainable at the Castle outside of Scenario editor and get access to Trebuchet.

Khitans renamed to Tanguts

Wei renamed to Khitans

Shu renamed to Bai

Wu renamed to Ryukyurans

Traction Trebuchet banished to Scenario editor and all Civs that had it get Bombard Cannon Instead.

replaced Wonders go to the Scenario editor as Unique buildings.

Khitans (formerly Wei) lose Hei Guang Cavalry and gain Steppe Lancers

Khitans (formerly Wei), Bai (Formerly Shu) and Ryukyurans (formerly Wu) gain access to Fire Lancers and Rocket Carts replace Mangonel line with appropriate Upgrades. IE Ryukyurans don’t get Heavy Rocket Carts

Chinese and Koreans lose knights and gain Hei Guang Cavalry.

Fire Archers shoot rocket arrows instead of flaming ones. (Literally just get a smoke trail on their arrows)

Tanguts (formerly Khitan) Emblem and Wonder given to Khitans (formerly Wei)

Tanguts (formerly Khitan) get new Wonder and Emblem.

Ryukyurans (formerly Wu) Get a new Wonder.

In game Civ emblems changed to fit the reworked Civs

In game history section changed to fit the reworked Civs

Some units and technologies have their names changes IE Tiger Cavalry → Pishi, White Feather Guard → Bai Li

3 Kingdoms campaign remains in game and use the non-reworked version of these Civs that don’t have Gunpowder units.

I feel this would be better than turning the 3 Kingdom Civs over to chronicles since Content Creators are already hyping up these Civs for online play. Otherwise I honestly do not have much of a problem with them other than the fact they break AoE2’s mold of Civs being ethnic groups or cultures of at least some significance, as the 3 Kingdom Civs are all simply off shoots of the Han Dynasty after it’s collapsed and did not last long enough to have it’s own identity even in the 3 kingdoms Period due to the constant change in territories.

The gimmicks while I’m not a fan of, I can still tolerate especially since I do like the look of all the new units. Hence why I thought of this proposal.

As for my reasons for choosing the 3 new Civs.

Khitans and Tanguts are easy because the most that has to be done is things have to be swapped around. Though Tanguts would need a their own Wonder and Emblem

The Shu becoming the Bai is also rather easy as the Wonder and Castle do not have to be changed since they exist within the area inhabited by the Bai peoples.

The Ryukyurans are here because they’d be more interesting than the Wuyue imo. Historically they used a lot of things imported from mainland China in their civil wars and were culturally much closer to the Chinese then the Japanese. So them having Jian Swordsmen and Fire Archers makes sense, while also being a naval civ because they lived on islands.

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It 100% was. The devs said it themselves

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The so-called “easy work” was actually not easy, involved developing a lot of new art and animations, and that alone wasn’t enough to give the civs a good sense of accuracy for their new names.

Renaming is actually pretty bad, just sacrificing and wasting the potential medieval civs (like the new Khitans and the Bai) or introducing civs that the game doesn’t actually need (like the Ryukyurans). All three renamed civs would become “zombie” civs, still failing to live up to the promise of the Three Kingdoms being their own civs in the promotions, nor becoming truly accurate to the medieval groups that became their new namesakes.

If the promise cannot be broken, then renaming is obviously not allowed too; if it can be broken, then renaming, a half-hearted and negative compromise, should not be chosen. A more positive and ideal approach would be to make the Three Kingdoms better as their own mode and introduce new well-crafted civs.

If it’s not possible to move the Three Kingdoms into a spin-off mode and introduce 3 new civs as a free update for who have bought the DLC as a way to fulfill the promise of 5 multiplayer playable civs, then the only option is to keep the Three Kingdoms here, without renaming the civs in an attempt to make them no longer belong to the Three Kingdoms.

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Proposal is reasonable, I just hope the dev spend their time fixing this, I don’t care how long it take, may be 3 or 4 patches later, who knows. 3K “haters” will be happy, ranked players will be happy as they get to keep 5 playable civs, 3K in chronicle is still selectable in lobby with setting for 3K fans. Win Win for everyone.

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A lot of words for basically saying nothing.

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The proponents of the “renaming” simply believe that doing so will not violate the DLC promise and that saving development work is necessary. In fact it still breaks the promise, so if the official cares about promises, it can’t happen. On the other hand if the official is willing to break promises then the devs might as well move the 3K aside and seriously create new civs instead of simply renaming the existing ones just for saving work.

This is what I tried to say, and this is what I have been saying for the past month.

Renaming is just a negative compromise, allowing them to keep introducing controversial civs in next DLCs because all they need to do is just rename. It may seem like a solution to the problem, but it is very harmful to the game in the long run. I hope the devs take more positive and desirable actions rather than this.

Edited:
In fact, With those renaming suggestions the civs are still not really accurate to the medieval groups who become the new name. If there needs to be changes beyond text and graphics, such as gaining or losing access to units, or replacing units, then why not just introduce new civs based directly on those medieval groups? I believe that people who consider this DLC “problematic” will be willing to take the time to wait for a more ideal solution.

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Welp you do bring up a fair point, though I’d point out that they’ve already renamed and reworked various things in both this game and AoE3 a lot over the years. So they’re within their rights to do it.

Afaik they won’t be in legal trouble because AoE2 DE has no physical release and that having misleading marketing material is the only way a company can get sued for false advertisement.

In fact a similar situation has happened before with No Man’s Sky, where 90% of the features touted in the trailers and Dev interviews were not in the game. But every lawsuit thrown at them got dismissed because the physical release of the game had no misleading marketing material.

So yes as bad as this precedent is, Companies can get away with this.

It’s not a good solution but I’d prefer this over banishing the 3K Civs to a seperate game mode.

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Or make Chronicles era bombard canon equivalent instead.

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They’d have to get a significant buff to be equal to Bombards tbh

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I personally like them as their own mode to focus on presenting the story of the Romance of Three Kingdoms, but I respect the opinions of people who want to keep them in the base game. If they can’t be moved to a seperate mode, then I’d rather they keep their kingdoms as playable civs than rename them, so that at least I can still look forward to a proper Khitanguts split and a Bai civ being well designed as their own civ, rather than having them neither accurate to 3K nor accurate to itself in order to serve 3K at the same time, becoming the “zombie” civs I said above.

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Very well! We can simply agree to disagree then.

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Ryukyu had their own culture inspired by Japan, China and SE Asia.
(Okinawan kobudō)
(I found a blog about Ryukyu army written by an Okinawa history geek. They had less army because they were peaceful.)

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These 2 statements go against each other. If renaming is a negative compromise which allows the devs to introduce faulty civs in the future, then introducing faulty civs and then taking their sweet good time to “fix” that by adding new civs, also allows them to introduce faulty civs in the future, with the prospect that they may be fixed afterward…and I purposedly say “may”, because the point of having to wait a long time before the fix arrives, will have the problematic civs set in the game and the willingness to remove them will be much lower than at the start.

This is why the intelligent thing to do, is to act NOW - remove the 3k civs from ranked for the time being, and then either rework them or rename them and remove their heroes, should they stay in ranked. “having to wait for a fix” is the worst thing at this point.

Take a look at the medals bug and the “fix”…they took their sweet time and did not release a super simple fixfor a month…what happened during that time? A lot of people completed scenarios on standard/medium, and then their medals got bumped up…so instead of actually delivering a proper fix after a month, or releasing a bad fix (that simply bumps all medals by 1 level) immediately, they chose to release a bad fix after a month. And if they promise a fix or a reword, but take their sweet time again, then they might just say “you know what, shu, wu and wei have fared pretty well so far, so they are gonna stay”.

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The difference is, renaming doesn’t really solute the problem.

It just make the 3K have the medieval masks, but these “medieval” civs still have to serve as the 3K civs so they won’t be accurate to the peoples who become the new names, and the civs have to get something changes to fit the new names so they also can’t be accurate to the 3K civs. That’s why I call them “zombie”. They have to represent a ancient kingdom and a medieval group of people that were almost not related with each other at the same time, so they can’t improve their representative. If they want to be more accurate to 3K then the accuracy to those medieval peoples will be reduced; if they want have more flavor of those medieval peoples, then the flavor of the 3K will be lost.

That is a lose-lose. Neither the 3K fan nor the medieval civ fan can have a truly satisfying result.

If we move the 3K into a mode (I prefer this way) or just leave the 3K there (I don’t think they have to be removed in any case), they have chances to be more accurate and more flavor to the 3K themselves, and the 3K fan can be satisfied at least. When those medieval peoples can be introduced as their own civs, they won’t be used as the mask of the 3K so they can do their best to represent themselves, and the medieval civ fan can be satisfied too.

This way there could be one win, or better win-win. As long as people keep asking for those medieval civs, it could be more possible to have them in the game in a decent way, no matter where are the 3K.

Don’t try to describe a lazy and harmful negative compromise of renaming as a intelligent and easy thing. And most importantly, don’t think this can really work.

There are people asking to swap the bonuses and parts of tech tree between the Armenians and Georgians from the very beginning, probably the second day after the Mountain Royals released, but there still nothing, and them are still waiting. Also, waiting the Central Asian architecture set for Persians, the Central European architecture set for Bohemians, a nomadic architecture set for Cumans, Huns and Mongols…

If people really want something better and are willing to wait, don’t compromise just for guessing that can be adopted quickly.